


Restitch The Images

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-08
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:52:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't shake the feeling that he remembers another life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restitch The Images

You hate sleeping. You stay up late on principle, so late the skyline is tinged orange and burning as your eyes are, and if you could you'd go without sleep forever. Time wasted, you tell everyone who asks why the bags under your eyes are a permanent feature. The music flows best when it's dark as ink outside, past midnight when every neuron in your head is firing raw melody and rhythm, and you'd lose it all if you laid down and fell into dreamland like every other two-bit music producer coasting by the sheer wasted potential the industry thrives on. Business strategy, you say. Musicians are eccentric (take the puppets for an example). Perfectly normal.

Little do they know how much you lie.

When you sleep it feels like your life has been hollowed out and you're a starving ghost in a colder crueler world. You close your eyes and in your dreams you're in a smothering garbage-choked slum of a city, the buildings painted a tourist-soothing purple sheen to hide the crumbling in their foundations, the cracking architecture and the detritus caked into every overflowing sewer like plaster. The residents are black and insectoid, things with the right number of limbs and the right shape to their faces, but all their movements are fast and jerky and wrong like demons and the skittering of light-shy centipedes and cockroaches. They carry blades. They bleed red fluorescent rave paint, the same as you do. Only history knows how many times some carapaced thug has cornered you, stabbed you, kicked you in the ribs, a whole gang ambushing you to string you up to the cold brick of a dirty back alley and slit a switchblade across your throat just to watch you bleed. 

There's demons in your dreams. When you were five they used to terrify you, but you're pushing thirty now and you know how to fight the fight, walk the walk through the Derse dark streets crammed to the gills with people, dream people who are too poor to afford food, too broken by the corruption up top to help the filth and the slime. Sometimes your dreams are okay, in the quiet morning of the market when the food is just starting to cook. Sometimes you almost feel rested when you wake up. But more often than not some gang finds you and stabs you clean in the kidneys, twists the blade and laughs and laughs as you collapse gasping with the hot white pain shooting up bright next to your backbone, as you bleed out into the slop in the gutter because they don't want no failed prince wandering around down here like he matters no more. 

You carry your sword every nap, every snooze, every food-poisoning-induced coma. In your dreams you are running for your life, and every single dream, you are crushed by the feeling that you need to be looking out for someone else. Someone is out there like you, a soft little human so easy to slip a blade into, and whoever it is (she? is), you need to protect that soul with your life. 

For years you'd thought it was Dave, and the terror had cut your heart to ribbons. Never. He'd never be unprepared. You'd train him up to dream with a sword in his hand just like you do, and he'd never have to die from a knife to the throat. Now you're not sure who it is, and in the darkness of midnight when you wake up from a dagger in each axillary artery, Cal sits on your chest like a lifeguard. You hook him over your arm and dial the number you never dial when it's light out. When the sun is up, this number that sits scrawled in black ink on magazine print in the back of your wallet doesn't exist. 

Roxanne answers, drunk, and through the haze you ask her for the hundredth time: "Are you sure you don't dream about a purple city?"

She just hums and says, "No, I've told you this before, come on, there are no purple cities except in your nightmares. Sometimes I want to prove it to you so maybe you can sleep for once, but I'm no good at dream theory and my formal training was in fucking biochemistry not therapy. Maybe there's something screwy in your head that you can only have that one dream, but I dunno. Still blows."

"Yeah," you say, heart still beating fast and hard and terrified despite the cool tone of your voice. "Well, it's nice to know you think about me even when you're considering an alcohol-induced mutation science world takeover."

She laughs, tequila in her tone, and for a moment you want a stiff drink more than anything else in the world. "So what did they do this time? Bamboo finger splits? That shit sounds painful, I was reading about that on Wikipedia last week while Rose was on her bender of learning all the methods of torture in existence."

"Hands bound over my head. Knife in each armpit."

"Oooh, fast kill," she murmurs, her words echoing as she sips her drink. "Sounds sucky."

"Quite sucky." Cal is still hooked over your arm, and you're somehow surprised to find your clothes aren't matted with blood. You rub hard at your eyes and sit up on the kitchenette counter, surrounded on all sides by knives and various other methods of self-defense. "May I be frank?" you ask, like a detached psych patient. 

"Sure, hold on, let me get my damn legal pad, I'll take notes. Go ahead."

You know she's playing, but still it calms you down a bit. "Honestly, it feels like I'm missing half of myself when I sleep. Like there's supposed to be this alternate version of me that awakes when my head hits the pillow, but for some reason he isn't there. He's never been there. And what I'm dreaming is a pale substitution of the real thing."

"Okay, but dreams aren't real, Dirk," she tells you. 

And you know that. You know. But you still say: "What if they used to be?"

For once she doesn't laugh. The silence drags on for a long moment between you, and when she finally speaks her voice is hushed in a spooked whisper, memory on the tip of her forebrain. "Then why don't I remember?"


End file.
